The marketing of your business is vital and is of high importance in increasing your customer base and product/service sales. Marketing your business is the effort you put in to generate leads and make sales and is the single most difficult task for a business and one that can be a make or break situation.
It really is essential to its success. Marketing attracts new clients, retains current clients, and reaches past clients. It is not so difficult that you need to call the consultants in, but it is not so simple that you don’t require to spend considerable time planning. Of course, we are all strapped for time with running our business. In that case a Small Business Consultant would be beneficial.
Marketing is perhaps a more long term strategy that can build brand and followers on a continual basis, perhaps more about creating image in the long term. Marketing doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg and is fast becoming highly specialized.
Marketing your business is your single most important task, yet for the vast majority of companies, it is pushed to one side or put off until later. Marketing, especially permission marketing, is one of the most important aspects of running a business. So just what is permission marketing?
Put simply, it is marketing centered around obtaining customer consent, or permission, to receive information from a company and is an excellent opportunity for small to medium businesses, allowing them to compete and get their message across without the huge marketing budgets expended by their corporate competitors.
Permission Marketing works by inviting the customers to opt-in to receive communications from you. Put another way, it is the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. Permission marketing initiatives include opt-in e-mail, where web visitors sign up to receive promotional information in advance in the form of e-mailers or internet newsletters.
Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. it can be in the form of a gift relating to your niche or a 5 part email course etc. Permission Marketing is a new phenomenon of modern business practice and it aims to create an audience with a high interest level by sending certain types of marketing information only to those who have specifically requested it.
Through the medium of email, it offers an exceptional mechanism to create and build client relationships and to understand your audience more intimately. Email marketing is being increasingly recognised as a cost-effective marketing tool.
Permission marketing is about building an ongoing relationship of increasing depth with customers and you start this process by setting up a squeeze page. What is a squeeze page you ask?
Squeeze pages are also known as “lead capture pages” or sometimes just “capture pages” or “landing pages”. They are a vital tool for offline marketing. Squeeze pages are a fundamental tool that anyone involved in small business should be using to build a targeted list of prospects in any particular market. Usually a single page website, they give the visitor one thing to do and that is to opt in to your newsletter or 5 part e-course etc.
Squeeze pages are designed to obtain a reader’s name and email address by encouraging users to opt-in to an e-mail list to receive more information about the topic of the website. A squeeze page gives you an ever growing list of potential customers and therefore sales. Once you intergrate a squeeze page with an autoresponder, your business will skyrocket. You may be thinking, Autowhat?
An autoresponder is a tool or system that allows you to generate automatic customized messages in response to requests received via email and/or a form on your web site. Basically an autoresponder is an automatic way to send e-mail.When someone subscribes for more information from your squeeze page their email address is inserted automatically into your autoresponder. They then receive periodic email from you on days selected by you. These emails will give hints, tips, advice etc on the chosen subject.
It allows your business to be in the potential customers reach. By building this relationship you are giving your business the best chance to be the one chosen to purchase from. The beauty of using an autoresponder in your marketing efforts is that you can virtually load a years worth of emails into the system then sit back and relax. Pure hands-off automation. Now, this might all sound fine and dandy but how do the potential customers find us in the first place? The internet is a huge place.
Through SEO, that’s how. Seo is Search Engine Optimization. It means you optimize a web page so that the search engines appreciate the content on your page and reward you with a high ranking. With a high ranking comes plenty of visitors as you are one of the first sites a visitor sees. This is not that hard to acheive but you have to nail down some basics. Of course, if this seems daunting to you, a consultant will walk you through the steps involved.
There you have 3 steps in getting a flurry of online traffic exposed to your offline business. Simple but not that easy. It would hold you in good stead to retain the services of an Offline Business Consultant to realize this dream.